Last week began with a row of police cars parked in front of our school. Over the long Easter weekend, a student posted an online threat to shoot up the school, prompting police presence and limited lockdown measures for most of the week.
The threat was posted on a “vent” Instagram page, where anyone can anonymously say whatever they want via a Google Doc, which then gets posted. The page that posted the threat was quickly taken down, which spawned a few new ones where more threats were made.
Admittedly, I didn’t think anyone was really going to come to school with a gun, but that isn’t to say I thought the situation was trivial. The feelings behind a lot of school shootings – isolation, frustration, desperation – are no doubt present across school campuses, and have already manifested horrifically. If anything, what alarmed me most was how kids threatened something like this so casually.
This is America: school shootings happen every year. The most common response from the communities where they happen is “we never thought it could happen here.” So even if I suspected the threat was really a handful of knuckleheads trying to get school to close for a few days, we have to be vigilant…
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